From the Computational Genetics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania (www.epistasis.org)

Monday, August 13, 2012

Modular Biological Complexity

There is a great new piece in Science on "Modular Biological Complexity". The author argues that without modules biology would be too complex to understand because it would take an eternity to run the experiments on all the many interactions. Note the idea of the "complexity brake".

"Given the large number of components that cannot be averaged away, any possible technological advance is overwhelmed by the relentless growth of interactions among all components of the system. It is not feasible to understand evolved organisms by exhaustively cataloging all interactions in a comprehensive, bottom-up manner."

0 Comments:

About Me

Edward Rose Professor of Informatics,
Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology,
Senior Associate Dean for Informatics,
The Perelman School of Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania